Psychology of intergroup relations: types, studies, possible conflicts and methods for their solution

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

From this article you will learn about the concepts of the psychology of intergroup relations. This is a very important and broad topic. The psychology of intergroup relations studies the interaction between people in different social groups. Interactions between the teams themselves are also studied. This has been the subject of research for a long time.

Social psychology of intergroup relations briefly

This issue was covered in the middle of the last century. In 1966, Muzafer Sherif proposed a generally accepted definition of the psychology of intergroup relations. Whenever individuals belonging to the same collective interact collectively or individually with another group of people or its members in terms of identifying their company, we have a case of inter-collective behavior.

The study of the psychology of intergroup relations involves the study of many phenomena related to collective processes, including social identity, prejudice, collective dynamics, and conformity. Research in this area has been carried out by many famous figures andcontinue to provide empirical insight into contemporary social issues such as inequality and discrimination.

Views

The topic of the types of these communications is extremely extensive. Often the types of intergroup relations include:

• cooperation (cooperation);
• public conflict;
• peaceful coexistence;
• competition;
• group feud.

History

Psychological study of collective relations and behavior began at the end of the 19th century. One of the earliest scientific publications is "Collective Consciousness". Written in 1895 by the French physician and scientist Gustave Le Bon. This fundamental idea is that when individuals form a collective, they behave differently than they do individually. Le Bon theorized that when individuals form a crowd, a new psychological construct emerges called the "racial [collective] unconscious."

Le Bon put forward three phenomena to explain crowd behavior:

• immersion (or anonymity) when people lose their sense of responsibility by joining the crowd;
• contagion, that is, the tendency of individuals to follow crowd behavior and suggestion.

Successive generations of research on intergroup relations and social influence built on these foundational ideas and examined them using empirical data. This is how they do it today.

Study of intergroup relations in social psychology

Empirical study of this phenomenon significantlygrew in the years after World War II. The Holocaust and the widespread use of propaganda led many sociologists to study intergroup conflict. Sociologists were interested in understanding the behavior of the German population under Nazi rule, in particular how propaganda affected their attitudes and how many people could follow orders or support the massacres of Jews and other minorities as part of the Holocaust.

Several prominent social psychologists were oppressed by the Nazis because of their Jewish faith, including Kurt Lewin, Fritz Haider and Solomon Asch. Muzafer Sherif was briefly detained by the Turkish government in 1944 for his pro-communist and anti-fascist beliefs. These scholars will learn from experience and continue to make major theoretical contributions to the study of intergroup relations.

Cognitive Revolution

The revolution in psychology in the 1950s and 60s led scientists to study how cognitive biases and heuristics affect beliefs and behavior. The resulting emphasis on cognitive processes represented a significant departure from the mainstream behavioral philosophy that had shaped much of the psychology project in the first half of the 20th century. During and after the cognitive revolution, researchers in intergroup relations began to study distortions in behavior and thinking, heuristics and stereotypes, and their impact on belief and behavior.

Solomon Asch's research in the 1950s was one of the first experiments to explore how a cognitive process (the need to conform to behaviorcollective) can override individual preferences, directly influence behavior. Leon Festinger also focused on cognitive processes in developing a theory of cognitive dissonance that Elliot Aronson and others would later use to describe how people feel sympathy for a community they were initiated into but whose views they cannot agree with. This is written in Gulevich's book "The Psychology of Intergroup Relations".

Discrimination and prejudice

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s led sociologists to study prejudice, discrimination, and collective action in America. In 1952, the NAACP issued a call for a social science study to further explore these issues in light of Brown v. Board of Education.

Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice provided the first theoretical framework for understanding and countering prejudice and established prejudice as the central center of social psychology. In his book, Allport proposed the Contact Hypothesis, which states that interpersonal contact, under the right conditions, can be an effective means of reducing prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Subsequent generations of scholars built and applied Allport's hypothesis to other areas of prejudice, including sexism, homophobia.

King's Performance

In 1967, Martin Luther King spoke at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, urging sociologistspromote the causes of social justice in their research. In his speech, Dr. King called on scholars to explore many topics related to the civil rights movement, including barriers to African American social mobility and political participation.

Intergroup interactions, the psychology of which this article is devoted to, are very interesting in the context of interracial relations. Therefore, this question is worth reading.

The study of types of intergroup relations in the last decades of the 20th century improved on earlier theories. For example, Lee Ross applied his research on bias to his work on the conflict resolution process in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.

Positive elements

Other scholars have focused on the positive elements of intergroup behavior, including help, cooperation, and altruism between communities of individuals. One example of this is a recent field study by Betsy Palak and colleagues where they used a radio show filled with positive social norms to increase conciliatory behavior in an entire village in Rwanda.

Scientists have also applied cross-group theories to workplace settings. One such example is Richard Hackman's work in building and managing teams or teams in the workplace. In particular, when team members are satisfied with their work, they can grow professionally by seeing their work as meaningful.

Technology advancement

The development of technology has also shaped the study of the kinds of intergroup relations first with the adoption of computer software. And then using neuroimaging techniques such as MRI, for example. One example of how psychologists are using new technology to investigate intergroup relationships is the implicit association test (IAT), developed by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues in 1998 as a means of measuring the strength of automatic association between different mental representations of objects. The IAT is commonly used to measure the strength of implicit bias for a variety of constructs, including workplace gender stereotyping.

Gordon Allport developed this hypothesis, which states that contact with members of another social stratum, in appropriate circumstances, can lead to a reduction in prejudice between the majority and the minority. The contact hypothesis is based on three psychological processes: exploring the external community through direct contact, reducing fear and anxiety when interacting with the external community of individuals, and increasing the ability to perceive the perspective, which leads to a decrease in negative evaluation.

Some researchers have criticized the contact hypothesis, in particular its generalizability and the fact that inter-collective contact can lead to an increase, not a decrease in prejudice.

Realistic conflict theory

Realistic conflict theory (RCT or RGCT), is a model of collective conflict,which describes how prejudice between communities arises from different goals and competition for limited resources. Communities of individuals may compete for specific resources, such as money and land, or for abstract resources, such as political power and social status, resulting in zero-sum hostile beliefs. RCT was originally proposed by Donald T. Campbell and was later developed in classical experiments by Muzafer Sherif. The Sheriff's Robbers' Cave experiment provided evidence for RCT by randomly assigning boys to summer camp with the same background in different groups.

The boys on these teams then competed against each other and elicited the outgroup's hostile beliefs until a shared goal of collaboration was imposed that required the teams to work together, resulting in less hostility. The sheriff argued that collective behavior cannot be the result of an analysis of individual behavior and that intergroup conflict, especially that caused by competition for limited resources, creates ethnocentrism.

Social identity theories

In the 1970s and 80s, Henri Taifel and John Turner proposed two interrelated theories, self-categorization and social identity, which together form a method for understanding the psychological processes that underlie people's understanding of their identity and belonging to a group.

Theory 1 (self-categorization) explains the contexts in which an individual perceivesthe totality of people as a group, and the psychological processes of this perception.

Theory 2 describes how individual identity is shaped by membership in a social stratum. It also predicts differences in intergroup behavior based on perceived status differences between social communities.

The impact of differences

Early research on intergroup relationships and interactions focused on understanding the processes behind collective interactions and dynamics. What did the experts conclude today?

Currently, intergroup relations are characterized by scholars applying and refining these theories in the context of contemporary social issues - inequality, discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and religion.

Meaning

Different theories from the psychology of intergroup relations have given many approaches to reducing prejudice. Scholars have focused on developing a theoretical framework for understanding how to effectively reduce collective conflict and prejudice. For example, a recent intervention developed by Patricia Devine and colleagues focuses on overcoming cognitive biases and reducing implicit biases.

Other studies to reduce prejudice have explored methods of intergroup relations and interactions, including cooperative learning (such as Elliot Aronson's Puzzle).

Meta-analyses of implicit bias reduction experiments showed thatmany of them have a limited effect that does not persist outside of laboratory conditions. Some experts have called for more field experiments and studies that use longitudinal designs to test the external validity and durability of existing bias reduction methods, especially job diversity programs that may not be captured by empirical research.

Other discoveries

Sociologists have studied phenomena related to inequality, such as poverty, disenfranchisement and discrimination, for a long time. However, experts have only recently begun to develop theories about the psychological consequences of social inequality. Current research has identified a tendency for whites to underestimate blacks due to false beliefs in biological differences.

Most research on social inequality has largely focused on single categories such as race and gender. More and more scientists are studying the impact of how the intersection of identities affects individual and group psychological processes. For example, Judith Harakiewicz and her colleagues viewed race and social class as intertwined constructs in a utility and value intervention designed to close the gap in racial achievement.

Levin's discoveries

Kurt Lewin is considered one of the founding fathers of social psychology and has made major contributions to psychological research. Levin founded the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1945.

Levin was interested inthe scientific study of the processes that affect people in collectively oriented situations, and the focus was initially on:

• on collective performance;
• communications;
• social perception;
• interpersonal and intergroup relations;
• community membership;
• leadership and improved performance.

Lewin coined the term "group dynamics" to describe how people and groups behave differently depending on their environment. In terms of interpersonal and intergroup relations, he applied his formula B=ƒ (P, E). The theory behind this formula emphasizes that context shapes behavior in conjunction with an individual's motives and beliefs, is the cornerstone of socio-psychological research. Levine conducted numerous studies that pioneered the field of organizational psychology, showing that collective decision-making, leadership training, and self-management techniques can increase employee productivity.

Gordon Allport

American social psychologist Gordon Allport is considered one of the pioneers of the psychological study of forms of intergroup relations. Particularly influential is his book The Nature of Prejudice (1954), which proposed the contact hypothesis that became the basis for research on prejudice and discrimination in the mid-1950s. Allport's contributions to this field are still being developed by psychologists. One example is the shared identity modelinside the community, developed by Jack Dovidio and Samuel Gaertner in the 1990s.

Besides making theoretical contributions to this field, Allport has taught many students who could make their own contributions to the study of intergroup relations. These students include Anthony Greenwald, Stanley Milgram and Thomas Pettigrew.

Sheriff Research

Muzafer Sheriff and Carolyn Wood Sheriff conducted several notable experiments on this subject in the mid-20th century, including the "Summer Camp" experiment. These experiments formed the basis of the realist theory of conflict, providing a theoretical explanation for the origin of intergroup prejudice, as well as exploring methods aimed at reducing negative attitudes between communities. The sheriffs suggested that collective behavior could not be the result of an analysis of individual behavior. And that conflict, especially that caused by competition for scarce resources, creates ethnocentrism. Muzafer Sherif's research on the psychology of collective conflict was based on his experience of observing and studying discrimination and social pressure in the United States and Turkey.

Carolyn Wood Sheriff, along with Muzafer Sheriff and Carl Hovland, developed a theory of social judgment that explains how people perceive and evaluate new ideas by comparing them to current attitudes. The theory outlined how people are persuasive and how this can influence individual and collective attitudes.

Solomon Ash

The work of Solomon Asch in the 1950s also helped in the study of levelsintergroup relations. He studied how the social pressure of the collective influences people in order to bind their behavior, attitudes and beliefs to societal norms. The results of these studies showed that people can succumb to social pressure, and subsequent studies have focused on the conditions under which they more or less conform to the behavior of the collective. Ash's research, along with Stanley Milgram's shock experiments, shed light on the psychological processes underlying obedience, conformity, and authority.

Teifel and Turner

British psychologists Henri Teiffel and John Turner developed social identity theory and later self-categorization theory in the 1970s and 80s. Teifel and Turner were among the first to study the importance of group membership and to discover how group membership determines behavior. Teifel invented the minimal commonality paradigm, an experimental method of randomly assigning individuals to collectives (for example, by tossing a coin), which showed that even when people were divided into arbitrary, meaningless communities, they tended to show favoritism towards their own group. This is very true for many movements and faiths these days.

Lee Ross

Lee Ross has studied several psychological phenomena closely related to forms of intergroup relationships, including the fundamental attribution error, insistence on belief, and naive realism, the idea that people believe they see the world objectively, and that thosethose who disagree with them must be irrational or biased. In 1984, Ross co-founded the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), specializing in applying findings from psychology, law, and sociology to help resolve international conflicts. Ross and his colleagues at SCICN have explored many of these concepts as they relate to conflict resolution.

Other scientists

Susan Fiske, along with her colleagues Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick and Jun Xu, developed a stereotype content model that states that stereotypes and intergroup impressions are formed in two dimensions: warmth and competence. The stereotype content model is based on the theory of evolutionary psychology. Individuals tend to first assess whether people pose a threat (warmth) and then predict how people will act based on the initial assessment (competence). It follows that social strata that compete for real or perceived resources, such as money or political power, are considered low in lukewarmness, while collectives with high status (for example, in terms of finance or education) have a high competency rating.. Fiske was also involved in developing a widely used list of ambivalent, hostile, and benevolent sexism.

Claude Steele and his colleagues Steve Spencer and Joshua Aronson are known for studying stereotype threat - situational pressure is felt when they risk confirming a negative stereotype about their community. At the heart of the mechanismthreats lie three factors: stressful arousal, performance monitoring, and cognitive efforts to reduce negative thoughts and feelings.

There is evidence that stereotype threat plays a role in the decline in job performance among people in negatively stereotyped groups, although other studies have questioned this. Steele and his collaborators have explored several forms of intervention to mitigate stereotype threat, including self-affirmation techniques and providing psychologically "wise" critical feedback.

Anthony Greenwald and colleagues Debbie McGee and Jordan Schwartz developed the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. It is used to test the strength of an individual's implicit (automatic) associations between mental representations, and is commonly used in cross-group studies to test for bias. Recently, the validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit bias has been questioned. Greenwald, who was a student of Gordon Allport, also studied community favoritism as it is associated with discrimination and hidden social bias on various topics, including the impact on medical school admissions and stereotyping among young children. This creates problems of intergroup relations.

Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto developed the theory of social dominance, which states that most groups are organized hierarchically in advanced societies. According to the theory, they are based on age: older people have more power, just like men. itarbitrarily established hierarchies that are culturally determined and may include race/ethnicity, religion, and nationality. The theory also predicts inter-group conflict relationship patterns based on strong hegemonic collectives that discriminate and oppress weaker communities.

Sidanius developed the Social Dominance Orientation Scale to measure the desire of members of the same collective to dominate and transcend outside communities.

Methods for diagnosing interpersonal and intergroup relations have also been studied for a long time. These studies are now very advanced. This is available in the book "Psychology of intergroup relations" by V. S. Ageev.

Jennifer Richeson studies racial identity, social inequality and race relations with a focus on understanding the psychological processes behind responses to diversity.

In a paper on social inequality, Richeson and her colleagues Michael Kraus and Julian Rucker found that Americans misjudge the extent to which economic equality has been achieved among both high- and low-income "whites" and blacks, redefining economic equality based on race. This is written in any textbook on the psychology of intergroup relations and interactions.